In 1967, there was perturbation among evolutionary biologists when Lynn Margulis published her scientific findings that complex cells did not evolve through competition but through a profound act of cooperation between ancient microorganisms. As science writer Dorion Sagan later reflected in his essay “Daughters of Time: Lynn Margulis and the Evolution of Cooperation” (published by the Feminist Press in 1989):
“The complex cells that build our bodies, that construct every living thing we can see with our naked eye, didn’t evolve through competition at all. . . . You exist because of an ancient collaboration. Your cells aren’t solitary warriors. They’re communities, partnerships forged in deep time.”
Evolutionary Altruism
Margulis’ Endosymbiotic Theory challenged the understanding that evolution is a matter of individual and group conflict, with only those out-competing each other able to pass on their genes. Tennyson’s description of nature as “red in tooth and claw” in his poem “In Memoriam” represented the Victorian view that Darwin’s world is a brutal one where only the fittest survive, and that this applied to social development as well.
The Social Darwinists of the 19th and early 20th centuries used this theory to justify a vicious and unregulated mercantilism, as if there were something inherently natural about markets competing against each other for profit, at whatever cost this might entail to the common good.
As in the case of Margulis’ discovery of evolutionary cooperation among cells, altruism came to be seen as important to evolution. Robert Trivers and Michael Tomase propose that human beings have evolved through “Reciprocal Altruism” with strong social norms and collaborative arrangements providing a greater evolutionary advantage than competition.
Tribal Conflict
The trouble is, human history illustrates a see-sawing between intra-group altruism and extra-group hostility.
We started out as small hunting-and-gathering bands of no more than 50 people who survived through mutual cooperation. When agriculture began to supplement our diet, however, bands merged into much larger tribes of between 100 and 1,000 members, living in several, often seasonal but established locations.
As long as bands are isolated, as some are in the Amazon basin of Brazil, the Philippines, and the Pacific islands today, they are sustained by inherited traditions and covenants that promote cooperation and loyalty. But when they grow into tribes, other tribes engage them in territorial conflicts and outright warfare, which puts the previously isolated tribes at risk of enslavement or obliteration.
On the other hand, history demonstrates that constant inter-tribal warfare can become an evolutionary disadvantage in and of itself, which is why we see sophisticatedly formulated regional alliances bringing a new kind of inter-tribal evolutionary altruism into play.
Take the Seneca Nation, for example. Sometime before the 15th century, five tribes — the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Cayuga (the Tuscarora joined later) — decided to put an end to their long-time feuds by mutual cooperation under The Great Law of Peace. This established shared governance and a balance of power among previously separate entities, impressing European observers, who organized their new country’s thirteen colonies into a federal structure inspired by the Seneca model.
Sadly, these altruistic alliances, in turn, evolved into instruments of vicious warfare. Around the late 1600s a group of New England Tribes — the Mi’mak, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, and Abenaki — formed the Wabanaki Confederacy to fight both the Seneca Nation and the newly arrived Europeans; then, they played a significant role in the French and Indian Wars (1754-1763), in which some tribes sided with the British and others with the French.
In the same vein, Europeans had no sooner landed in Massachusetts than we were recruited as allies of Wampanoag leader Massasoit (who could have wiped us out but who liked the look of our rifles), with whom we maintained a treaty of mutual defense against neighboring tribes for decades.
The twentieth century has been called “The Century of Total War” because of two all-out World Wars between alliances of European and Asian nations, illustrating once again how war between organized (now national) confederations can make violent competition counter-productive.
After the punitive Treaty of Versailles (1919), which ensured that World War I would lead directly to World War II, altruistic policies like the Marshall Plan were devised to help the conquered nations get back on their feet. The United Nations was established in 1945, and it created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
When, in the 1950s, it became clear that nuclear war with the Soviet Union could lead to “Mutually Assured Destruction,” or MAD (extended by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972), it became a strategic doctrine to keep us out of nuclear war.
Although the streak of nationalistic belligerence has lingered on in human nature, bogging us down in ill-conceived “forever wars” like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan for America and wars of nationalistic expansion for Russia, Israel, and China, nuclear war itself has been avoided.
The sophisticated data analysis our marvelous but dangerous brains have developed enables statistical analyses such as Peter Turchin’s theory of cliodynamics, in which he uses mathematical models to outline how historical cycles unfold.
The core finding: When national elites compete with each other for power while subjecting populations to inequity and poverty, they create unstable societies. Nor are advanced technology and great wealth sufficient to ensure a nation’s survival, which requires trust, social cooperation, covenantal agreements, and inter-group coordination.
Related Articles
Here is a list of articles selected by our Editorial Board that have gained significant interest from the public:
Global Warming
The problem is that every time a society advances in social altruism, the resulting cohesion becomes a weapon against competing societies, precluding the rapid leap to the worldwide evolutionary altruism we need in the very short time left before global warming leads to human extinction.
On the one hand, the industrial and technological advances that our considerable reasoning capacities have produced will do us in if we can’t control our competitiveness and belligerence; on the other hand, we have already come up with mutually altruistic international collaborations.
In 2015, the United Nations created the Paris Agreement, a global pact that 194 countries joined, pledging to keep global warming below 2 degrees centigrade. The impact of the United States dropping out of the agreement (leaving us alone with Libya, Iran, and Yemen) is severe, but perhaps not fatal. Though it is doubtful that nations of NATO or of the Paris Agreement will ever trust the United States not to elect someone like Trump again, we are only one (albeit powerful) country among the nearly 200 willing to take the leap to a worldwide altruism that might save our planet.
For example, the Citizens’ Climate Lobby‘s Nerd Corner reports that the International Energy Agency has declared that the world has officially entered the Age of Electricity. As they explained it:
“For the first time, most new electricity demand is being met by clean sources like solar and wind, and renewables are now growing fast enough to meet (and even exceed) the rising global electricity demand. In fact, in 2025, available electricity grew at well over twice the rate of overall energy demand. . . . And bonus! Ember recently published a similar report, finding that clean energy (predominantly solar) met all new electricity demand last year. . . . Taken together, these trends point to a powerful shift: clean power isn’t just scaling, it’s stabilizing the world’s energy system.”
Frustrated by the slowness of the United Nations Climate Change conference, as once again exemplified with COP30, which met in Brazil last November but failed to propose methods to phase out the fossil fuel industry, 50 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia in April for the “First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels.” Determined to overcome dependence on fossil fuels once and for all, these nations seek ways to transform energy supply and demand while advancing international cooperation and climate diplomacy.
“We need a rapid, global shift to renewable power, shorter grids, and efficiency, so emissions fall fast and stay down,” declared Former Peruvian Environmental Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who concluded that “[w]e need a coalition of the willing to show us the way.”
Planetary Intelligence
While we human beings are faltering along in our one-step-forward, one-step-back disagreements between coalitions of the willing and the unwilling, our visions of international altruism are bolstered by a theory that the planet itself may come to our aid.
Planetary Intelligence is the idea that earth maintains a natural balance between its atmosphere, climate, biology, oceans that always returns to sustainable planetary stability.
This heartening theory, built upon James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, is proposed by scientists like Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker, who argued in “Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process” that although human activity can destabilize this balance, it is possible, if we cooperate in lowering global warming, that Earth’s inherent tendency to restabilize itself might save us.
Or, as the Dalai Lama (who, by the way, is a long-time student of Quantum Physics and has written a book on The Universe as a Single Atom) puts it:
“Our world is deeply interdependent. In the past, we were concerned only with people in our own locality. Nowadays, challenges like the climate crisis and global warming affect us all. They mean that we must take the whole of humanity and the entire planet into account.”
